time: the refreshing river 



society based on science, and die more so the more it is so based, 

 into a ruthlessness derived from the very statistical character of the 

 scientific method itself. The ruthlessness with which a biologist 

 throws out an anomalous embryo useless for his immediate purpose, 

 the ruthlessness with which an astronomer rejects an aberrant observa- 

 tion, may too easily be applied to human misfits and deviationists in 

 the socialist world order. The wimess of the christian man may then 

 recall the marxist to a sense of the fundamentally unmarxist character 

 of such treatment. It is unmarxist because no philosophy recognises 

 the emergence of levels of high organisation better than dialectical 

 materialism, and the individuals of which the human social collectivity 

 is built up are themselves the most complicated organisms in the 

 living world.^ Hence christian love in the form of tolerance is trans- 

 formed into a recognition of the manifold forms which human thought 

 and being may take. As long as aberrant individuals are not permitted 

 to be a danger to the socialist state, the greatest tolerance should 

 prevail. There is no need for marxists to follow the example of those 

 many unchristian christians who manned the Inquisition, the witch- 

 hunting tribunals, and the boards of godly divines in Geneva, West- 

 minster and Massachusetts. 



We have here a principle of genuine importance. Christian theology 

 has been called "the grandmother of bolshevism," since communist 

 planning alone has seen how to incorporate the love of one's fellow- 

 men in the actual structure of economic life. Some have seen another 

 ancestor in the rationalist and philanthropic ethic of ancient Con- 

 fucianism. But communism is based just as much on the findings 

 of natural science and the method of science itself The socialist 

 society must therefore guard against taking over from science too 

 much of scientific abstraction, scientific statistical ruthlessness, and 

 scientific detachment from the individual. 



Christian Theology the Grandmother of Bolshevism. 



Important for the decay of religion in our time is the general and 

 increasing domination of the scientific mind, or, rather, of a popular 

 version of the state of mind characteristic of the scientific worker. 

 Constantly growing power over external nature leads to a tacit belief 

 in the possibility of solving the problem of evil by what might almost 

 be called a matter of engineering. The principle of abstraction leads 

 to a weakening of that attention to the individual and the unique 



^ This explains Blake's antipathy to Newton. 



70 



